Necravolver

The conceit of an era that turned the color wheel inside out was to reward three-color combinations the allied-enemy structure had always kept apart, and the Volvers are the cleanest expression of that brief: kicker creatures whose colored payments reach outside their own color identity. The body here is base black, but both kicker options cross the enemy gap. Green buys two +1/+1 counters and trample; white buys one counter and a lifegain rider that fires on any damage the creature deals, combat or otherwise. Pay both and you get a black creature wearing Abzan colors, exactly the kind of card the pie was meant to forbid. The design lives or dies on the kickers being independent and additive: each is a discrete additional cost with its own rider, so the card scales from a vanilla 2/2 through every partial payment up to the full three-color package without modal text enumerating the cases. That additive structure is what makes the cycle tick. It is also worth being precise about how kicker works, because it shapes how the card plays: the extra costs are paid as the spell is cast, not later. You commit to the colors at the moment Necravolver goes on the stack, which means the choice is front-loaded and the deck has to already hold the green and white when you cast it. Kicker was an early-era way to teach multicolor play through optional commitment rather than forced fixing, and this is the cycle's survivability-and-pressure member: the one whose white half turns every point of damage dealt into a life swing.